He know's PC's can have much better hardware. This is more addressing the fact that unlike PC's, which most are tied to the Window's OS eating RAM, the PS4 is built for Gaming and to be utilized for gaming.

"He also pointed to the memory limitations of the 32-bit versions of Windows as an example of how PS4 titles could even surpass what "most PCs" can do."

Keyword is most. With the PS4 (and probably the Xbox 720 unless it's Window OS running) devs are working on a PC minus the Window's OS. At least thats what I'm getting from this article.

Either way, when these consoles release it should be good for everyone. I'm holding off on even buying any PC hardware upgrade (only need my GFX Card), due to the reason that they may release better equipment at a cheaper price to compete.

wow, thats actually intelligent. Im doing the same thing. Im sticking with pc but wont upgrade until the ps4 goes past the early adopter stage. A huge part of the gaming market is multiplatform, and I dont want to be under powered. but of course some of the stuff said is complete bs, less and less pcs are running 32 bit and even less gaming pcs are. If you buy a pc today it wont be 32 bit. And windows isnt even that heavy other than using nearly 2 gigs of ram.

as far as comparing 8 to 7, 8 runs better and uses less resources than 7 did. When you look at the 360, you can see the refinement they made in that OS and translated well onto the PC with windows 8.

My netbook has 2gb of ram and runs way better on 8 than it did when it shipped with XP. And i never thought there would be any windows better than XP. It had a nice balance of performance to resource ratio.

windows 8 breathed new life into an old machine and made it possible to enjoy using it again. i can only imagine how well it makes newer PC's run on much better hardware. As a comparison, my work PC has 4gb of ram and runs windows 7 and just doesnt feel as zippy as that little netbook. Even when doing similar tasks like office or surfing the web/youtube.

Just to point out, this is my own personal experience and not representative of others in general.

I cant believe people actually think Windows is some huge hog. Windows barely needs 1.5gigs of RAM, Windows 8 even less so.

Most PC these days easily come with more than 8 Gigs of RAM. Hence Windows pulling 1.5Gigs of RAM hardly matters.

People need to look past that. Windows gives you advantages too. People gaming on PCs have access to a library of games from 25 years back. Its all possible because of a solid platform Windows has become.

Its amusing when people cheer consoles and their optimization yet forget every gen they are left with a lack of BC.

The next thing they tend to boast about is console optimization, yes its there but it wont magically make the hardware over come limitations. As an example even today PS3 & Xbox 360 both get out performed by a Dual core PC equipped with a 8800GTX. So where did the console optimization go? The same 8800GTX today gets outperformed by 100USD GPUs.

The same fate lies for the next consoles. Lack of BC and will be getting outperformed far quicker by Low mid range PCs far quicker than the last consoles.

Windows, like most general purpose OS's is a resource hog. Only focusing on ram usage is overlooking the many layers of inefficiency built in to such an OS in order to deal with all the various flavors of hardware it might be running on.

Each level of abstraction adds more overhead. Plus there are all the services that serve no purpose if it were purely used for gaming.

A purpose built OS running on purpose built hardware can greatly outperform a general purpose OS running on the same hardware.

For the disagrees just take a look at the minimum hardware requirements for windows NT vs Windows 7. Back then I was running a 66Mhz Pentium with 32MB of RAM, I think 16 was the minimum and you needed about 100MB of disk space.

Today you need a 1Ghz processor with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of disk space.

So RAM has gone up by a factor of 62.5, CPU speed by a factor of 15 (actually it's much higher than that since modern CPUs do far more per cycle) and disk space by a factor of 160.

If Windows is so bad then why is it 8800GTX with a dual core is still beating current consoles? PC optimization is no where near as bad as console makers want people to believe. Sorry but these are just sad attempts by console makers to make the PC look bad so they can sell their consoles, while charging a premium on every game sold.

People blame Windows for taking up RAM, wait till the PS4 releases, in all likely hood 1-2 GB of RAM will be reserved for the OS. So will PS4 OS be called a resource HOG too? Def not as a machine becomes more multi purpose it certainly needs an OS. It just so happens the PC is far ahead of the consoles and next gen consoles will most likely be featuring OSes of their own.

I didn't say PC's weren't ahead of consoles, only that because of the diverse hardware and the software abstractions needed to support such hardware that PC's are not nearly as efficient as they could be.

In my career I've written a couple of RTOS from scratch as well as porting others and kernel work on desktop and server OSs.

A simple 32bit RTOS with full multi-tasking, threads, paged memory, networking etc. can run in Kb's of memory on a 32bit arm running at a few 10's of Mhz. Running a simple OS such as that on something of the caliber of a modern PC would just scream and would provide all the services necessary for gaming.

Once you start to generalize the inefficiency is inevitable, add in the legacy code needed for backwards compatibility and the overhead becomes quite significant.

Microsoft could use Windows on the next Xbox by stripping out all the extra crap that is unnecessary on a fixed hardware spec and I'm sure it would outperform stock windows by quite a margin.

Again the inefficiency isnt ground breaking. Yes its there, and consoles are more efficient no one is doubting that. However the differences arent ground breaking.

If consoles were so efficient there would be no reason why the PS3 wouldnt outperform a 8800GTX. 8800GTX is about 2x as powerful and the result is pretty simular too. PS3 runs most of its games in 720p or below while 8800GTX runs most games in 1080p. So where is the console optimization?

Now yes all of us can start nit picking over the Windows OS. However with the amount of resources available today we honestly should be looking at the benefits of backward compatibility too. I personally own over 200 games on Steam alone.

Imagine if i had bought those games for a console. It would have ended up costing me upward of 7000usd, when next gen arrives i would have had to keep the old console too, just to play my old library. Hence personally i think its a good thing Windows offers such BC, in exchange for the resources it takes up i think its a bargain specially when resources are abundant who cares?

@Kevnb-Wise choice. No reason to buy a PS4 if your just buying muiltiplats and you have a beast PC already. I would just wait too.

@Reynod- He is trying to say in order to have a PC beat a PS4 or 720 you need MORE then 8gigs of ram, you need MORE then 1.85 TFLOPS etc. Why? Because PC isn't as optimized. ON top of this.....what PC game is even fully supporting all that tech anyways? PS4 will use that tech before a damn PC game does day 1!

I'm not sure you can even name me a successful PC game this year or last year that required and used that much power.

I game on PC and consoles and the one thing consoles have over PC is opitmziation. Period. To even have a beast PC, you need to have developers ac actually supporting it. Don't run to me telling me you maxed out Assassin's Creed or Mass Effect etc.....if you did your a idiot for buying a souped up PC for just a bit of high res.

Most of these gaming rigs also do not have the CPU and GPU on the same die (much faster connectivity between the two), 8GB's of GDDR5 to play with, etc... They are general purpose office machines that have had high performance parts grafted onto them in order to enable them to play videogames... while still having to maintain general purpose functionality. A console is tuned specifically for gaming at the hardware level, and as such will always outperform a PC with the same specs.

What you are forgetting now, is that the PS4 OS is likely to be a similar "general" purpose OS. Maybe it doesn't have as many features, but it certainly will have to do a lot of the same things.

The PS4 and likely the next Xbox will also have a slightly bloated OS.

Furthermore, Windows once it is loaded and running, it's background tasks takes pretty minimal resources. The RAM requirement isn't that huge of a deal either, because most PCs today have far more RAM than they need, that is system RAM, not even video RAM.

Windows 8 on top of this is designed with low powered devices in mind, so it uses even less resources and that is why it loads so fast.

The real problem of PC is that consumers installs a crap load of extra services in the background that they don't turn off. The other problem is optimization due to too many different configurations, but even on consoles you aren't likely to even get double the performance that a PC can dish out by brute force.

From what I can tell, this is the biggest gap between a launch consoles and PC performance. I suspect that is due to the PC having virtually no resolution cap whereas consoles have 1080p and a relatively low price attached.

It varies game to game how well optimised they are but PC game optimisation has gotten better and better and will only keep getting better with better OS refinement, Direct3D advances and the fact the consoles are now x86 machines.

Certainly you do not need a massively more powerful PC to beat a console.

It isn't like you need 5 times the power of a console to actually best it.

You'll start to easily the the difference when a PC is twice as fast.

To be honest, that isn't difficult. We already have cards that are more than twice as fast as what is inside PS4- that wasn't the case when 360 launched it took time for PC to reach that point.

So PC is in a great position.

In fact I saw that an 8800GTX can manage bioshock infinite playable on 'medium' @ 1080p.

According to the devs 'medium' PC settings are a bit better than console settings and 1920 x 1080 is way more than double the resolution the consoles run that game (PS3 renders the game at a mere 1152 x 640)

Soooo......... Yeah.

Lets not claim PC optimisation is that bad and that crippling when 6 year old PC hardware still comfortably trounces console hardware without being like 10x faster.

Im not understanding where people say windows uses 1.5 gb of ram comes from. Vista which was the worst OS used 1.2, windows 7 uses like 800 mb and xp used like 300 or 400 lol.

consoles may be using less software in the background and have hardware on the same die and all. But lets not forget the cpu is designed with low power in mind arm if im not mistaken. Least that's what I heard. That's basically what your smart phone and tablets use. Just with more cores. PCS still have power house processors. And lets not even talk about the gpu. The gpu that's coming with these consoels is like a big joke. Thankfully console gamers aren't picky and take what they can get. Microsoft and Sony get this therefore they will give them the cheap dirt stuff. Most pc gaming rigs are way more powerful and only cost $400. lol If you don't believe me I can link you to the parts.. its not difficult to build one. yes for $400 you can get a pc that's twice as good as next generation consoles that haven't even been released yet.

But you go on ahead and defend the corporations that are playing you for a fool and laughing all the way to the bank. Enjoy!

It isn't just what Windows uses that causes problems, it's that it's so easily cluttered. But it doesn't matter. The PS4 will be an upgrade from my PC (which is an AMD 1090t, GTX 460, and 8GB RAM). So I'll be buying a PS4 instead of upgrading and will only upgrade my PC when the need is obvious again.

There are just some things a windows (or any other general purpose) OS will never be able to do. For example, if I have a 16GB machine and an APU (Trinity) installed, wtf do I need to set the shared mem size for the GPU and why can't I go beyond 2GB and why does it take this memory away from the OS.

It's not so much the HW, but there is so much legacy code in the OS (still) that for a console this either needs to be adapted (and I am sure even MS will customize windows for the 720 to allow this) or you need your own OS.

With these new chips with an intelligent OS you would have one kernel which handles that huge block of memory and you could just allocate it with whatever you want handing it over back and forth between CPU and GPU. This needs a massive change in the OS and it requires HW which can actually share memory pointers between the two (coherent memory model).

These are just legacy restrictions which a PC will carry over with each generation. It is almost impossible to overcome those just to be compatible with a wide range of HW...things which a console does not need to do.

- a shared memory model is required to not copy e.g. vertex data between CPU and GPU which happens quite frequently, still - even though you'd push more code to shaders these days.

Why would you want to go beyond 2GB on a APU like the trinity? Its not like trinity is any good at games and even then a game requiring that much Memory just wont run on the APU to begin with, unless you want to be seeing a slide show.

For dedicated GPUs they already come with super fast GDDR5 Memory.

So your arguement doesnt make any sense. As usual you are just making attempts to nitpick over non issues.

Again if Windows is so bad as an OS why doesnt PS3 or Xbox 360 beat the 8800GTX? its just twice as powerful as those machines. As per you if Windows is so bad and unoptimized why doesnt it get beated then? Yet every 8800GTX running on a windows OS even today runs most games in 1080p, yet both the current consoles run 720p or below.

Again i would tell you to look beyond the nit picking and see the huge backward compatibility advantage Windows offers. Tell me are you going to have PS2, PS3, PS4 all hooked up at the same time just to play your games library? I know i will be having just 1 PC playing the hundereds of games i bought over the years. No need to maintain old hardware to play everything i bought. Hence while there are certain disadvantages, i would think the advantages far out way them.

That's not the point. The point is, that a PC is holding back SW architecture because of its legacy constraints - especially in dedicated use cases which is e.g. gaming. As such a general purpose machine will never be able to allow developers to go the "optimal" route. Trinity is gen 2, Kaveri is gen 3, and the 2014 road map will have a complete heterogen memory sub system. And, why wouldn't I wan't more than 2GB? Why is it the OS's job to limit my creative engineering approach? Obviously you guys boast to have more than 2GB which in return means, textures must be cached in DDR and swapped out frequently - even on a system like Trinity. This is totally useless overhead since you never need to go across a bus unless the OS forces you to. BTW: One could simply optimize games for APUs which you would probably be surprise what you could squeeze out of that cheap configuration. But I guess it kinda counters even inhouse AMD products like a 7990...

Same will happen with PC ports to PS4 if devs don't take advantage of "don't move the damn memory" rule which still applies to the PC. Guess why they stick GB's or RAM to gfx boards these days, huh? So your data must never leave VRAM. Obviously.

Not sure why I still bother talking here...I guess that's so over your heads anyway...good bye

Whats the point in moaning when in about 2-3 years you'll be able to have system memory on PC knocking out over 300GB/s compared to about 25 now. You could dump whatever APU you want on a die and have loads of bandwidth to share in a unified pool should you so desire.

Chip stacking is the real computing technology revolution and consoles will just miss it and PC will reap ridiculously massive benefits from it inside the next few years.

Amazing how people are still thinking in terms of 'power' when the most popular games today are simple, small footprint titles like subway surfers and league of legends.

Hell bioshock infinite runs on outdated tech and its still a fun game. The more visually complex and 'powerful' a game becomes, the more expensive it is to produce, and the less development risks can be taken.

This obsession with 'power' is a pubescent male fetish and a self defeating loop.

of casual games, like Subway Surfer. Though I do agree, some of the smaller indie type titles get more creative. I think believable expansive worlds and detail, and the hardware capable of bringing in new gameplay design possibilities is what true evolution in gaming is all about.

I look at the recent the recent trailer for "The Last of Us" and when I see the look on the 2 kids in the beginning, and I feel the emotion.

You know I disagree. I am a graphics whore so presentations means a lot to me. It puts me into the experience. A game can be graphically impressive and fun. There is room for all types of experiences. God forbid the industry turned into all casual mobile games and vice versa.

"This obsession with 'power' is a pubescent male fetish and a self defeating loop."

^^^You're bang on about that. People need to care more about the creativity and imagination of the content over how well they can push it's pixels. It's a completely vacuous and meaningless diversion.

I mean, honestly, I don't like LoL and I don't like casual games, but nevertheless there are lots of really incredible games that have been achieved without ridiculous tech. The SNES Final Fantasies and Chrono Trigger are still some of the greatest games I've ever played by a long shot. The visuals, the music, the narrative- they're all fantastically designed and I'll never forget them.

The tech has outrun the creativity- we need to forget about the tech and just work with what we've got to produce memorable and enduring games. I can only name about 10 games I've actually cared about this gen. We have more than enough power to make awesome stuff. In fact I think the tech is holding back games from being taken seriously. Instead of making profound and intelligent games, devs are fixated on making empty blockbuster film-esque graphics showcases. And people just lap it up and demand more of the same. They don't even realise what they're missing.

To be honest, one of the reasons I'm sort of looking forward to the Ps4 IS it's understated specs. They're obviously dwarfed by high-end PCs but who cares? Maybe we'll start seeing some more interesting games at last.

comparing a $500 console with $500 GPU's is nuts. they are telling this now for marketing of consoles eventually when future games comes out when the most pc yes most pc's have better graphics and better details then they will again say just deal with it "its a pc after all" If they don't support make games with better graphics for pc then they will just piss off the gpu manufactures and the pc community. and I personally think they are not that foolish.

HD 7850, 175usd, comes with Bioshock and Tombraider free. Thats more of a fair comparison. Even then by the time PS4 is out there will be better and cheaper GPUs out that will likely outperform the PS4.

But it isn't as good as the titan...the best card out...lol...jk...developers are happy to finally hav a decent static system modeled after a pc. I still don't understand all the arguments. Everyone should b happy. Console gamers get a better console thatsveasier to build for. Its potential is unknown. And PC gamers can still use the PC. Except now because consoles drive software, PC gamers get better games too.

I agree,they are just gutted that they spent suchensuch on their cards etc and boasting its a beast but now ps4 is showing to be just as power full for a measly 300 quid.. fuck,I'd be pissed to if I was a PC bod lol

the main issue here, is everytime a developer says they are glad for the pc like architecture because... or anything that relates to the new consoles to PC; some twat has to post about how "their pc is better because blah blah blah- and why everyone should have the setup they have or a pc setup in general because of how 'superior' it is" well at this stage i wish they would just stfu. 1) Whats the point of a mega expensive setup that costs developers more money to take advantage of and to do so end up compromising gameplay? 2) Not everyone can afford to pay that sort of money for a PC; with the risk of virus's and the other increased costs of a PC in general-plus the very real possibility you may have to upgrade withint a year or two to stay at the top of the game. 3) If you honestly think a gpu under $450/$500 is going to outperform the ps4- priced about this price on it's own then you clearly understand nothing about different processor-gpu setups, bandwidth in ram and all the other factors that will effect how the device performs. Numbers on paper mean fuck all. 4) I'm not willing to spend a few hundred pounds to potentially just see some facial hair and cracks in the ground etc look a tiny bit better...

The Ps4 will be an awesome console, I know of 10 360 owners that are going for Ps4, plus all the ps3 owners are just upgrading, Im going to get 2 Ps4's, one for my room the other for the living room, I have to let people know a sad truth, the only reason the 360 sold evenly with the ps3 here in mexico is that the 360 was easier to hack and get pirated content for it. I know how it sounds but Mexico is a third world country, people need the cheapest option.

You're absolutely right. And I absolutely do not care. I'll be sticking with consoles next gen thanks.

Im glad you're happy with your PC. Im happy with my console. In a perfect world we'd both be content with our choices and that would be that. Except in the gaming world thats not enough is it? Its not enough to be self content, we have to push our views onto others too. To somehow convince others that our choice is the superior one to justify our decision. Well allow me to break this cycle...

The thing is EPIC support MS over Sony so to come out and say this just amazes me. They could have made the Gears series multiplatform after 2 but they seem more interested in there partnership with MS and making money from there engine. So speaking highly of Sonys consoles this time around won't make MS too well. Saying that EPIC supported PS3 really well early on as it added mos support for UT on ps3 only the only ps3 game with mods proving ps3 can do it.

I was just curious as to what you were talking about? Epic and Microsoft have a great relationship and Microsoft has really good relationships with most third party developers, which is why they've been able to take advantage of timed DLC and things like that.

What have they messed up for you personally? I mean do people not realize how bad things would be if Sony or any single company had zero competition? You'd be stuck paying whatever they want, play whatever they want, and the list goes on and on.

We need all the companies how they are, each one playing off the other and that benefits all gamer's.

Nah xbox can keep gears, i wouldn't say epic is a great studio either, gears is okay and they even admitted that they wanted to make the story similar to band of brothers but they just weren't able to achieve that, so they made a bro shooter instead.

lol considering it's coming from the same guy who wanted to look cool by insulting the WiiU and claiming that unreal engine 4 won't work on it (which it does), this guy is a complete joke....makes me almost miss Cliffy B, ALMOST but I will never miss that fool.

While the PS3 is no high end PC, it will play games very close to high end PCs. PC uses brute force to outpace consoles, straight up powerful hardware. Consoles rely on devs working with specific hardware to optimize for it. If you were to get the same exact hardware equivalent as the PS3 and tried running a game at the same settings, you would realize the PS3 runs it better.

a game like crysis 2 in 2560x1600 looks better than anything ps4 will ever do

and crysis 3......shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit, even in 720p it looks better maxed on pc than any ps4 game will, and when you crank it up to 1200p, its bloody aamzing

ilive below, people bash on the system becasue articles like this.......and people on here get the idea from articles like this that the ps4 will be anywhere near a high end gaming rig....it will NEVER be close to a pc with a gtx670, gtx 680, gtx 690, gtx titan.....never.......

People are disagreeing with you? My GTX 590 (1000$ when I bought it) gives me a TINY performance jump for Bioshock Infinite running at 45-60FPS over the PS3 version. That's only a year and a bit old graphics card. Now take a graphics card from the year PS3 was released and I highly doubt it'll push games like Bioshock Infinite, Battlefield 3 and others as far as the PS3 can. Just like if you bought a high end gaming PC now, you need to upgrade at least every 2-3 years to keep up with the PS4/720.

It has zero to do with raw Hardware strength and 100% to do with developer support. Barely any developers (Valve and such) develop their games for hardware that isn't recent. So you may buy that Titan epic 3000 beefcake edition now, but it'll be a load of wasted money in 2-3 years when PS4/720 is outperforming it for Bioshock 8 or Battlefield 44: Dinosaur edition.

Don't get me wrong, PC hardware is much more powerful than the PS4. But pure meat means absolutely nothing when nobody supports it. Which is where console gaming has the technical advantage. Developers have been saying it for a while. But apparently gamers know more than the guys working the hardware and realizing platform strengths.